Its been a while since I scraped something in my blog. I attended the IndiMix’06 event at the National Centre for Performing Arts(NCPA), Mumbai recently and I should say it was a very memorable experience. The keynote was given by Steve Ballmar, CEO, Microsoft Corp. He is indeed a very good speaker, just as good as the other Steve from the company that makes mp3 players and other stuff😉. He was followed by Anil Kumble who showcased his company’s product, Matchcast. It is a high end cricket stats and analysis application, which is to be officially released in January, the same month when Vista is supposedly going to be released. Also at the event was Yash raj, who had his brand new website www.yashrajfilms.com lauched by Mr.Steve himself.

The central focus of the event apart from cricket, bollywood and ofcourse the dot com gurus of India were the new cool products from Microsoft – Expression designer and developer. Being a web developer, the product which got my attention was the Expression Web, which helps you develop standards based websites with ease. I had a go through this application in one of the demo stations at the event and it is certainly cool tool to get your hands on. More information on Expression can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.mspx

I won a contest at the event and got a cool iMate smartphone. Thanks to Microsoft for giving away such cool prizes. I was eyeing on the XBox and dreaming how it could turn my boring weekends in to gamers heaven, well it stayed as a dream. Atleast I get to play Solitaire in my smartphone. Not as exciting as XBox though but will do for the moment :-p

It was my first trip to Mumbai and I should say I had mixed feelings about the city. It had everything any other metro city in India had and may be more. The stench, the pollution, the traffic jams, the pubs and the busy life, reminded me of my life in Chennai. Life in Mumbai is very tough, as stated by my new friend I made at the event. It is good place to be in if you are filthy rich. Well, not my kinda life. Will blog more about my experience in Mumbai sometime later.